joining us is steve allen, m&a practice leader. thanks for coming in. >> thank you. >> it's interesting because we seem to be reporting on more deals, we just announced three there. what are the figures, though, saying? >> well, there are deals happening, but fundamentally in this quarter, significantly less. we're down this quarter compared to about 370 last quarter. so it is dropping off. i think it's interesting, you're getting a lot of noise in the media about some of the big deals which are very interesting. certain sort of deals are happening. but generally, if you look across the board, across the world, there's fewer of them happening. and the big hits. the americans prove the deals major. europe is a notable one. we didn't have the spike there. last quarter you had the big uptick in northern america. that simply didn't happen in europe. europe is continuing to be unsurprisingly slow. >> and we had this sort of spike in the fourth quarter. it has in the u.s. why hasn't that followed through? >> the reasons some of these dea